Music

Tonight, on the eve of Johnny Cash’s birthday, the Lakewood Bar & Grill welcomes audiences to the fourth annual Johnny Cash Bash, a show complete with an assorted mix of local and national acts all paying tribute to the legendary man in black. The five acts  on the bill will…

Quite the show at Lola’s Sixth in Fort Worth tonight with The Appleseed Cast rolling through town. Should be kind of a special show, too: The band performing, in entirety, its seminal releases Low Level Owl 1 and 2, back to back. It’s an interesting decision–especially since, as Aaron Ladge…

For the majority of the rap world, the pool of influences is composed of a very shallow range of artists. So many will list among their favorites Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G., Rakim and Tupac. But artists Astronautalis and P.O.S. quite clearly stray from those conventions, drawing from a seemingly widening supply…

Killswitch Engage released the first disappointing album of its career last year, and though it was just announced that frontman Howard Jones has been removed from the rest of this tour, chances are still pretty good that the band won’t disappoint live. Face it: This is an act that really…

I’ve always been a sucker for a good lyric. Friends and family know I’m prone to well up simply recalling some of the great songs that I’ve committed to memory over the years. (At least Flight of the Conchords finally gave me a good excuse for when this happens: “My…

You never know who you’ll be standing next to at a Tegan & Sara show. For more than a decade the Canadian-born duo has run the gamut of music styles, promotional methods and, in turn, fans. You’ll probably run into a few stray teens from the local mall-punk set, primed…

Last time I saw Akron/Family multi-instrumentalist Dana Janssen, he was coursing across a homemade Slip ‘N Slide made from a large piece of linoleum found by the curb in front of a frat house in London, Ontario. Though the temperature checked in somewhere in the 40s that night after the…

Bryce Avary doesn’t really look all that happy, which is pretty weird because, let’s face it, Bryce Avary is supposed to be happy. Or so anyone who’s taken a listen to the 27-year-old Grapevine native’s surgary-sweet power-pop as The Rocket Summer would assume. After all, over the course of the…

Zachary Carothers, bassist for the experimental rock band Portugal. The Man, knows that his band has a new album coming out soon. And he’s very excited about the record. He’s just not exactly sure of the release date. “It’s coming out late March—I’m pretty sure,” says Carothers, sounding a bit…

Christopher Crisci is a man of few words. Well, that’s only partially true. When he’s not performing, the lead singer and guitarist for the Appleseed Cast is a relatively talkative guy. But when he’s making music, Crisci’s words are sparse—especially on the band’s latest full-length, Sagarmatha. “On this record, the…

In case you couldn’t tell by the skull and crossed-electric-guitar logo, or by the album title, or by song titles such as “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” “Up to Eleven” and “No One Gets Out Alive”—this six-song, 19-minute EP is an abrasive blast of greasy hard rock. And, as genres…

“Red dirt” and “Texas country” have long baffled me. Such overly vague terms are essentially useless in actually describing any sort of a sonic style. I haven’t a clue as to whether this is a good or bad thing, actually—the variety of styles associated with the aforementioned “genres” range from…

In concert, Hello Lover’s carousing, swaggering stage antics boast a sort of cock-of-the-walk, booze-in-hand charm to go with the band’s “rainy U.K.” instrumentation a la Sisters of Mercy and Jesus and Mary Chain. It’s a rather carefree, loose approach. But what’s underneath? On record, the band seems to have a…

Last Wednesday night, the fine young Denton gentlemen known as Matthew and The Arrogant Sea stopped on by our Oak Cliff filming location to treat us to a slew of new songs and a couple stories about the process behind recording them. It was a pretty fun night, too–frontman Matthew…

Welcome to Staff Trax (formerly Check Out This Jam!!!), the weekly feature here on DC9 where we shed some light on the music we’ve been enjoying of late, regardless of the touring or album release schedules that tend to bear the focus of most of our coverage. Also, it’s a…

Damaged Good$ finally went and did it yesterday, releasing the $pread Love Not Germ$ mixtape its been teasing us with for a few months now. It’s worth the wait, too: Beyond the three songs the band has already given out for free to promote the release, the free-to-download mixtape (click…

Cue the 9/11 jokes: The Dave Matthews Band will play Superpages.com Center in Dallas September 11. But while that show announcement might otherwise bring a collective shrug to the shoulders of this blog’s readers, his opening act is a Dallas Observer favorite, Austin punk/soul lover Black Joe Lewis and the…